


Dark Hours Before Dawn

by imaginary_golux



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-05-30 02:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6404245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginary_golux/pseuds/imaginary_golux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Our heroes are fighting the good fight, but that doesn't mean they're immune to nightmares.</p><p>Beta by my Best Beloved, Turn_of_the_Sonic_Screw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Resistance Will Not Be Intimidated

_“Ren wants the prisoner,” the new Stormtrooper says, and Poe is unshackled from the chair, shoved unceremoniously to his feet. The new Stormtrooper seizes him roughly by one arm, drags him out into the corridor; his blaster is aimed unerringly at Poe’s chest._

_They are going to Poe’s death. Poe knows it, can taste it like the blood in his mouth - he is useless now to the First Order except as an example, as a dead pilot who can never fly against them again - they are going to kill him. Possibly they will film it and send the vid out to the Resistance, to General Organa and Jess and Snap - possibly it will spread far enough that even on peaceful Yavin 4, Poe’s father will wake to see his son die in living color._

_Poe could fight - he could try to escape - maybe the Stormtrooper marching him towards his doom would shoot, maybe Poe could die here, in this nameless corridor, and at least his death would not give the First Order a propaganda vid - but Poe does not want to die._

_He does not want to die._

_The Stormtrooper has his arm, and Poe is marching to his death, and he does not want to die._

*

Poe shoots upright with a gasp that’s half a scream, sheets pooling around his waist, and sits panting in the darkness. Across the room, BB-8 bloops a worried question and turns the lights on, dim and grey but better than the blackness; next to Poe, Finn blinks himself blearily awake and turns to look up at Poe with a frown.

“Hey, buddy,” he says, and sits up, offers his open arms. Poe collapses against his chest, buries his face in Finn’s sturdy shoulder, and just clings to him for a while. Finn is warm and alive and Poe is alive and they are _here_ , in Poe’s bed in D’Qar base, and Poe is not dead -

“Hey, hey, I’ve got you, you’re okay,” Finn murmurs, stroking Poe’s back gently. “That must’ve been _some_ nightmare! I’ve got you, buddy, you’re safe, it’s okay.”

Poe stops shaking after a while, sits up and scrubs his face with his hands. Finn wraps a comforting arm around Poe’s shoulders and waits patiently.

“D’you remember how we met?” Poe asks eventually.

“Kind of hard to forget,” Finn says wryly. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I thought you were taking me to my execution,” Poe says softly. “I thought I was walking to my death.”

“Oh...kriff,” says Finn slowly. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Poe tells him firmly. “You did what you had to do, and it ended up working - you could hardly have come in and told the guards you were escaping with me! Just...comes back to me sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Finn agrees. This is not the first time one of them has woken from a nightmare in the dark hours before dawn; it will not be the last. They both know what it is to have the terrible moments of the past return, vivid and inescapable, in dreams. “Still. What can I do for you?”

“Just...be here,” Poe says, and Finn shuffles around until he can brace his back against the wall, gathers Poe into his lap. Poe rests his forehead in the curve of Finn’s shoulder and just breathes, slow and deep, Finn’s arms warm around him and Finn’s breath steady against his hair, Finn’s heartbeat echoing through Poe’s own blood: _alive, alive, alive_.

Poe must fall asleep at some point, because he wakes up just after dawn, the dim grey square of the window steadily brightening, and sits up to find Finn also asleep in what _must_ be a dreadfully uncomfortable position, arms still wrapped snugly around Poe. Poe traces the outlines of Finn’s familiar, beloved face with his eyes, waits for the moment when Finn sighs and blinks awake, and leans in to kiss him.

The kiss is a sort of victory: it is a new day, and they are alive, and where there’s light, there’s hope.


	2. Survivor's Guilt

_They are five, and Slip is the smallest, and Eight-Seven pulls the other boy along by the wrist to make sure they reach the end of the obstacle course in time to avoid punishment._

_They are ten, and Slip is still the smallest, and Eight-Seven spends precious minutes nagging him to eat instead of chattering in the mess hall._

_They are fourteen, and Slip is taller now, but Eight-Seven is still pulling him out of trouble, still covering for him when he messes up, still pulling him along when he falls behind._

_They are eighteen, on their first proper assignment, and Eight-Seven fishes Slip out of the sludge at the bottom of the sewage sump_ again _and knows he is going to spend hours tonight helping Slip polish his armor, because otherwise Slip will do a half-assed job and another demerit might be enough to get him decommissioned._

_They are twenty, and Eight-Seven has been disciplined fourteen times for neglecting his own duties in order to keep Slip from falling behind, and he knows as he slings Slip’s arm over his shoulders and staggers forwards that this is going to be a fifteenth demerit, and he does not put Slip down._

_They are twenty-three, on their very first combat deployment, and the blaster shot out of the darkness catches Slip unawares, and his blood stains Eight-Seven’s helmet as he falls. And Eight-Seven hates himself a little, because his first thought is ‘That’s going to require polishing’ and his second thought is ‘He never did look around’ and it is only his third thought which is ‘No, no, no.’_

_The blaster in the darkness fires again, and Eight-Seven looks up from Slip’s body and knows he could dodge and does not -_

*

Finn wakes to the sound of his own full-throated bellow of rage and sorrow, startles himself entirely out of the bed and thumps hard to the ground, bruising his hip, and curls up into a ball with his head in his hands, weeping helplessly. Poe fumbles himself out of the sheets and comes tumbling down gracelessly onto the floor beside Finn, gathers Finn up as best he can and strokes his short hair and murmurs things Finn can’t quite hear in a soothing tone.

“You want to talk about it?” Poe says eventually, when Finn’s weeping has subsided into occasional wrenching sobs and sniffling. He hands Poe a box of tissues, and BB-8 comes beeping over with the trash can clenched in its little grasper. Finn blows his nose and wipes his face, tosses the tissues into the trashcan with a murmured thanks for the little droid.

“You know I was there, on Jakku?” he asks. “When you were captured?”

“I didn’t realize,” Poe says slowly.

“I couldn’t shoot the villagers,” Finn says, wincing in remembered pity. “So Captain Phasma ordered me to reconditioning. So I escaped.”

“Ah,” says Poe. “Which is where I enter the story. But - no, if you were on Jakku -”

“Were you shooting?” Finn asks. “When we - when the First Order invaded?”

“I was,” Poe admits. “I killed a few Stormtroopers. I’m glad I didn’t kill _you_.”

“One of them,” Finn says, and stops, sits up enough that he can curl his arms around his knees like a child trying to make himself small. Poe shuffles around to sit next to him, leans against him warm and comforting. “I ever tell you about Slip?”

“You’ve mentioned him,” Poe says slowly. “The one in your squad who wasn’t...as good as the rest of you, yeah? The one you kept pulling out of trouble? What - oh, _kriff_.”

“Yeah,” Finn tells his knees. “He died on Jakku, from a blaster bolt. From - from out in the desert, not from the village.”

“Oh, _kriff_ ,” Poe says again, sounding ill. “Oh, hell, buddy, I didn’t - shit, I don’t even know what to say. I’m so sorry.”

Finn sighs. “It’s...he wasn’t a friend, really. Just...I was _responsible_ for him. And he was your enemy. He would have killed or captured you, same as any of the rest of us. Hell, _I_ was your enemy then. So he was a legitimate target, and you were trying to help the villagers, and...I don’t blame you, okay? But...I looked out for him since we were...cadets, kids, I don’t even know. He’d have hated me for defecting, same as Nines does, and he’d have killed you without even thinking about it, but…”

“He was the closest thing you had to family,” Poe says quietly. “I...would really like to hug you right now, but if you don’t want me to, I understand.”

“Hugs,” Finn says, shifting around to straddle Poe’s lap and bury his head in the curve of Poe’s neck. Poe wraps his arms around Finn and holds on tight.

“Okay,” he says after a few minutes, “let me - I can’t be sorry I killed a Stormtrooper who was trying to massacre a village. But I can be sorry as hell that your brother is dead, and if you want to mourn him, I can help you try and find some ritual that works for you.”

“Yeah,” says Finn, rather wetly, against his shoulder. “Yeah, I’d - I’d like that.”

“Tell me about him,” Poe says softly. “Remember him as you knew him.”

“He was...he was a little _shit_ a lot of the time,” Finn replies. “He told these kriffing _awful_ jokes, and half the time they didn’t even have punchlines, just new swearwords he’d learned from the older cadets. This one time, he smuggled in a holo from kriff knows where, memorized the kriffing thing - it was so _stupid_ , it was an episode of some awful soap opera - used to quote it at us while we were cleaning our armor…”

Finn talks till dawn. He rambles, doesn’t bother trying to put together a coherent narrative, just says whatever he can remember: the time Slip managed to trip and fall while carrying an entire stack of plates; the one and only time Slip ever bested him at hand-to-hand (because Finn had a fever so high he was hallucinating) and then gloated about it for weeks; the time Slip ate too much in a desperate effort to grow a little more and was ill all over the barracks, and Finn helped him clean up before the nightly inspection and got a demerit for having dirty armor. He talks himself hoarse, and as the window begins to grow light, he runs out of words.

“We’ll light a pyre for him, if you like,” Poe suggests gently. “Tonight, if you want. Bring a bottle of something good and toast your brother’s memory.”

“Yeah,” says Finn. “Yeah.” He raises his head and looks Poe in the eye, manages half a weak smile. “And - maybe it makes me a horrible person, but I’m glad you hit him and not me.”

“So’m I, buddy,” Poe replies. “So’m I.”


	3. There Is Music In The Midst Of Desolation

At first it’s only Poe and Finn sitting beside the pyre, sharing one of Poe’s hoarded bottles of good whiskey and staring into the fire, shoulders warm where they lean against each other. But after a little while Rey comes out and sits down on Finn’s other side, tucks herself against him comfortingly. Finn hands her the bottle; she takes a ceremonial sip and hands it back.

Very quietly, Poe starts to sing, an old sad song in the tongue of Yavin 4, about love and loss and the bitterness of being the one left behind to mourn. He’s watching the pyre as he sings, the flames against the night sky, and so he’s a little startled when he finishes the song and looks around to find Skywalker and General Leia sitting beside Rey with their arms around each other, Jess and Snap seated near Poe, Kaydel and Nien and half a dozen others - Finn’s friends and Poe’s friends alike - all sitting quietly around the fire.

“We brought booze,” Pava says after a long, still moment. “Price of admission, right?”

“Right,” says the General, producing a bottle of Corellian whiskey from somewhere. “Who’ll give us the next song?”

“I will,” says Skywalker, to general surprise, and sings, soft and low, a song in a language Poe has never heard before. When he is done, Poe is startled to see that the General is weeping, tears rolling silently down her cheeks.

“The _Lament for Alderaan_ ,” Snap murmurs. “‘Where are the spring flowers / where are the children laughing / oh, my brothers, oh, my sisters / tell me where our mother’s grave lies.’”

“Oh,” says Finn softly. “That’s right - the General’s from Alderaan.”

Poe nods.

Kaydel says, “I’ll sing the next one.” It’s sweet and sad and old, and her voice quavers a little on the high notes, but no one minds that much. Half a dozen people join in on the well-known, well-loved chorus, Poe among them, and he hears Rey chiming in, quietly, from Finn’s other side.

“We are here to mourn,” Skywalker says softly when Kaydel’s song has fallen away. “Let us speak the names of our fallen, and remember them.”

There’s a brief silence, and then the General says, voice not breaking but full of tears, “Korr Sella.”

Pava says, “Ello Atsy.”

“Han Solo,” says Rey, softly, and the General reaches over to put a gentle hand on Rey’s arm.

“Slip,” says Finn, so quietly Poe can barely hear him, and then, louder, ringing in the still night, “My brother Slip.”

Other voices, other names, and Poe puts an arm around Finn and listens to the roll-call of the dead. There are too many names; but they’re at war. Death is their constant companion.

The roll-call falls away to silence, only the crackle of the fire left to fill the night, and then Luke rises and goes to stand beside the fire. “They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,” he says quietly, and Finn begins to weep, very softly, against Poe’s shoulder. Poe puts his arms around him, and Rey curls around Finn’s back, and they hold him tightly as shields against his grief. “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,” Luke continues, and his voice seems to fill the vast night sky. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”

“We will remember them,” Poe says, and the others around the fire echo the words. “We will remember them.”

Luke upends the bottle of Corellian whiskey over the flames, and they shoot up blue and enormous, driving away the darkness for a single bright moment. And Finn raises his head from Poe’s shoulder, and pulls Poe into a brief, sweet kiss, and says, “Thank you. This...this helped.”

“Helped me too, buddy,” Poe admits. “Think it may have helped us all.”

“‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning,’” Finn says softly, leaning back so he can loop his arms around Poe and Rey’s waists. “Yes. That’s what makes us different from the First Order. Both sides send people out to die, but we - we will remember them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Luke quotes, and the chapter title, are from "For the Fallen" by Robert Laurence Binyon.


End file.
